Richard Hacker

Spinning toward the ground from 5000 feet, my stomach somewhere in the back of the plane and my inner child screaming, I pondered why a writer would intentionally put an aircraft into spiraling dive toward the extremely hard earth below. I would like to say I let the left wing drop and felt the plane flip nose down to the ground for the sake of art, but to be honest, in that moment, it just seemed like the thing to do. And maybe bizarrely, I found my situation rather funny. I mean, it’s one thing to be obliterated by an errant asteroid while enjoying a beer at the local pub. It’s an entirely different matter to intentionally point a plane to the ground as you watch your potential gravesite spin in your vision. As you may have surmised, I survived my little spin with fate. For some twisted reason yet to be uncovered with psychotherapy or beer, I have always found human behavior in the face of contradiction and paradox intriguing and have dedicated myself to continually exploring the quirky aspects of life on this planet and beyond, this reality or other potential realities. My novels relish the absurd side of what it means to be an ordinary human being living in extraordinary circumstances in the past, the present and the future. Sometimes those adventures lead to the world of science fiction where the rules of physics, time and space might bend and creative absurdity leads to survival and maybe even success. At other times well meaning characters with a somewhat twisted take on reality make ill advised choices leading to ugly results. My writing takes a humorous perspective on human nature — we are, afterall, just trying to do our best with what we’ve got at hand — and how we adapt, ignore or implode. We all get to chose our impact. Like spinning to the ground in a plane, we can either chose a graceful recovery or make a rather dramatic indentation in the surface of the planet. The fun, however, is in that moment of decision. Or is that indecision?